


Ripple Effect

by iiiigdfv



Series: I don’t know you (but I’d like to) [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst, Currently stand-alone, Gen, I have never tagged before in my life, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, One Shot, Post-Canon, Romance (Kind of), Roy POV, Truth’s a little bitch, alternative universe, little bit of, royed, what if
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 03:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20717075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiiigdfv/pseuds/iiiigdfv
Summary: Something is missing in the office. Three years on from the Promised day, Roy is determined to find out what.





	Ripple Effect

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first time posting something. It kind of came out of nowhere and it has been a while since I watched the anime so some things may be slightly incorrect. Please feel free to let me know! Constructive criticism is so very welcome.

Roy often looks to the door. 

Absent minded as he enters the office he will glance down, noting the scuff marks in the paint. Often, he thinks that he should get someone to refresh the paint – a part of him reminds him there’s no point.

It will just get scuffed again before the paint even has time to dry.

And often he will continue on through the door without another thought on the subject. Until he sits in the inner office, with his door open, looking through it past his subordinates’ desks to the main door and he will frown and think he should get someone to repaint the door - it’s unprofessional. Because what cause does a door in a military stronghold have to get scuffed in such a way, anyway?

Roy doesn’t know. But he doesn’t get the door repainted.

Sometimes when the halls beyond the office are particularly busy, or when a soldier walks past with a particularly heavy tread, Roy will look up and look to the door again. He looks at it and expects it to open – open hard enough to slam into the wall next to it where it will slot into the dent already there like a pair of those eclectic matching saltshakers.

But the door doesn’t open and when it does, it’s just Fuery slipping in with ducked shoulders and his hands full of fresh, bitter coffee. Roy accepts the offered coffee with a nod and sometimes a grateful smile and the heavy footsteps in the corridor retreat, unheeded. And so, under Riza’s watchful gaze, Roy will pick up his pen again and gets back to work.

—————

There’s something wrong in the office, Roy thinks. Something wrong and something missing. It starts with the door, then the couch – the old ratty couch in the corner that had seen better days and that Roy kept because someone was putting it to good use… right? Then there’s the way Havoc complains, that the office never used to be this quiet (the intended word ‘boring’ sputtering out like a dying flame as Riza turned her deific eyes his way) that Roy was much less of a stick in the mud before the Promised day, even if he had kept stealing Havoc’s dates. (Roy reasoned it was probably for the man’s own good; if the women were that easily swayed to another man, they probably weren’t good enough to warrant a second date anyway.)

But Havoc’s words had stuck in his head like a caught latch that kept sticking. And eventually Roy decided Havoc was right. Things had changed in the office. It was the same office, despite his promotion to General. The same door, the same couch, the same team, the same walls, windows and desks– except not all the same desks. Roy’s own had had to be replaced when it cracked, a long, tremulous line down the middle like it had been slammed upon by irate fists just one to many times. 

And so, Roy knows, something is off. And slowly, slowly, he feels he is piecing it together.

—————

It’s three years since the Promised day. But sometimes Roy still expects Envy or another of the homunculi, to come lurching out of the shadows between buildings as he passes – he sees Envy’s face split raw in two with a wicked, looming smile, like the curve of a blade edged with scathing words and the blood of Maes Hughes.

On those days, Roy often ends up at Madam Christmas’ bar to get blind drunk and be glad he will actually be able to see it in the morning. 

He sits on a stool at the counter. He catches sight of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye, and notes that the colour is wrong as he sips from the tumbler in his hand. The girl is Annie, she’s new working at the bar. She’s young.

Roy thinks of Alphonse. He wonders how the boy is doing, Roy hasn’t seen him in person since he left the hospital three years earlier to recover in Risembool with the Rockbells, but he calls the office occasionally – sounding more and more distant each time. He sounded distracted, when they last spoke; he always sounds a little distracted these days, a little confused and perhaps even a little lost. Roy wonders if losing your body will do that to a person, or if, perhaps, the wrongness he feels, Al feels too. 

Last he heard, the boy – who was more of a man these days, really – was travelling Xing, researching alkahestry. Roy wonders if he has a specific goal in mind. Alphonse did seem the driven sort.

Roy wonders a lot of things.

Like sometimes, how he even knows Al.

Madam cackles something in that boisterous voice of hers and tells him to quit sulking as she refills his tumbler. He swirls the browned liquid around, watching the cubes of ice clink together. He can tell by the smell as he raises the glass that he’s been cut off, but he downs the tea anyway and tries to think about happier times.

But in the end, he just ends up thinking about war.

He expected as much.

—————

There are gaps in his memory. Roy swears it. And he swears he’s not the only one.

He is consumed by a sense of déjà vu, dogging his footsteps like a grim waiting for him to trip.

There are wisps of remained emotion with no context, floating loose in his skull. There are scenarios with no catalyst. There are events with no impetus. Strangely, a lot of them involve Alphonse. But he’s always off to the side, the loom of his armour skulking in the doorframe but always just behind. Why was he there? Sometimes he’s perched rather delicately on Roy’s weird couch, sometimes he’s in the outer office gambling cards on the sly while Riza is distracted. Sometimes he’s apologising – but not for himself. 

All of Roy’s old filed mission reports seem to have suffered some unexpected circumstances and damages. Nothing is retrievable.

It takes him a while, but he thinks he’s figured it out. After reading through an old newspaper, he finds it: ‘it’ being an older article about Liore, talking about the cities turn to peace. In it, is a grainy photo of what appears to be a gathering in the city centre – to the left side is a statue. He’s facing away, but Roy recognises the stone rendition of Alphonse’s old armour. What confuses him though, is the other part of the statue; the raised circlet of stone is sized for two figures, the other that would stand right against stone Al’s back. But all that is left is a pair of crumbling stone boots.

And Roy wonders then, that what if the thing they have been missing all this time – is a person?

Riza startles as he stands. 

“Lieutenant,” he says, “I need to make a call.”

—————

While Roy couldn’t be sure, he thinks Alphonse may have cried.

He had called and they had exchanged pleasantries before Roy had gone on to explain his hypothesis. The phone had sputtered a choked noise in reply that was half staticky feedback and half lonely boy who finally knew he wasn’t going crazy.

And then Al had laughed, a good, freeing laugh that had lifted an unknown weight off Roy’s shoulders. “I don’t know anything about them,” Al had said into the phone, his words thick with too much emotion, “but I’m going to find them, sir. I –” he paused and swallowed audibly. “I think I’m going to find my brother.”

And Roy couldn’t help but grin.

—————

He doesn’t think he agrees with what Alphonse said about not knowing anything about the person missing from their memories. Roy realises he knows a lot more than he thinks. They all do.

Roy looks at the office door with new eyes. He knows they probably had a temper, or something of the like, if they felt they had to kick the door in every time they came to work. He figures they were probably quite loud by the way he expects them when the corridor is busy. He knows they must have liked his office couch – and now that he looks closely at it he can see the slightest dip in the fabric where they must have thrown themselves whenever they arrived, and the odd pulls of plucked, fraying thread where their hand would have rested on the armrest. He notices the faintest alchemical marks he thinks he’s ever seen on the wall, and when he looks harder, on several pieces of their office equipment and suddenly it makes sense why some of their things run so smoothly.

He thinks they must have been blonde, and judging by Alphonse as a possible blood relation, it doesn’t seem a far stretch. He also thinks they must have deferred to the colour red somehow, because Roy had been walking and the colour had flashed in his vision so sharply, he had stumbled as the woman strolled past, the bright red of her dress coat lapping elegantly at her heels. He couldn’t imagine this person ever wearing high heels, but the coat was fitting somehow and he added it to his growing mental list.

And slowly but surely, Roy starts to make sense of things.

Whoever this person was, they were important. To a lot of people. The effect of them is still here, still rippling afresh. Too large to slip back into the mellow lap of water; they are like a tsunami that is growing greater by the day.

Now he just has to find him. 

Roy hopes desperately that there is still someone to find.

—————

Roy doesn’t know it right away, but it is actually them that finds him.

He is arguing with a librarian.

“Look lady, I was a State Alchemist. I know my watch doesn’t have any name on it but that’s circumstantial! I just need in there for like, five minutes!” The mans blond hair is thrown messily up on his head in a loose bun that’s slipping towards a ponytail. He’s not dressed in red, but a long brown coat instead and he has white gloves on the hands that he is frantically waving around; one does, indeed, clutch what appears to be a State Alchemists watch.

“Is something the matter here?” Roy asks in a way that says he clearly knows something is the matter but he’s trying for polite and only slightly lauding his status over their heads as potential mediator. They are outside a library, after all.

“General!” The librarian, a usually stern looking older lady says, flushed with surprise.

The blond whips around, his hand with the watch still raised for argument but his golden eyes wide. (Roy can’t help but think he may be the most attractive person he has ever seen.) “Mustang?”

Roy looks at him confused. It takes him a few seconds, before the realisation crashes down on him, like a breaking wave over his head. And then he knows.

“Oh,” Roy says, in what he’ll deny is wonder, “it’s you.” To the librarian he quickly nods and tells her he’ll handle the situation. He’s finally found what they have all be looking for.

“Do you – you know who I am?” The man asks, brows furrowed but eyes hopeful.

Roy shakes his head. “Not in so many words. I don’t.” The man nods and looks away, looking disappointed but not like Roy’s answer was unexpected. “But,” Roy continues, and throws himself in the deep end, “I know you used to kick in my door. I know you used to pick apart my office couch and cheer up my staff. I knew you were blond, and I knew you wore red. I knew you were gone.”

The blond blinks back up at him. For some reason Roy thinks he should be shorter.

“What?” He chokes out.

Roy swallows hard and tries to think of some way to explain. “It’s like an array drawn in pencil. You can erase it but if you’ve pressed too hard the lines are still there on the paper. Or maybe some of the lead is smudged. Point is, there’s always evidence. We’ve known something was missing for some time. We just couldn’t find you.”

“Oh,” the other man says, and Roy can see his brain ticking away furiously for the answer. “I thought – like some kind of ripple effect, the stone is gone but it’s effect on the water tension remains. Truth removed me. Just me.”

Roy thinks of the destroyed files (he’s willing to bet that were written in the blonds hand, especially if the watch is anything to go by), and the ruined statue in the newspaper. He thinks of a few of Hughes photographs that he had noticed were missing in key places on Gracia’s wall, that he could never quite remember clearly what they had been even though he knows that house better than his own. And he thinks the blond is right, his appearance and person and name – were all gone. But a broken vase was still a broken vase, even if no one claimed to have been home to see it fall. 

Truth had removed the person and the things linked to them directly, but it had not fixed Roy’s door and it had not fixed Roy’s couch. And just like the loose threads, it was all starting to unravel.

“We should talk about this elsewhere. Can I take you out for lunch?” Roy asks.

The other man looks a bit stunned by the offer, and Roy begins to expect a different answer than the slow nod he gets.

“Wait,” the blond says as Roy leads them back down the steps to his car, “I suppose I should… reintroduce myself. ‘Cause well, yeah,” he sticks out a hand to shake – the right one, and Roy is somewhat surprised to note how warm his skin is through the glove when he takes it. His own gloves are stashed in his jacket pocket. “I’m Ed. Elric.”

Roy feels a smile unfurl like some kind of cat on his face. He hasn’t felt like this for quite some time and a strange excitement runs like an electric shock up his spine. “Roy Mustang at your service,” he replies, “but please call me Roy.”

“Er, Roy then. Yeah. Hey, is that Aerugonian place still on Fourth? After spending so much time in Creta, I need a change in pallet.”

Roy chuckles. “Of course.”

“Good. And I hope you’re paying,” Ed looks over to meet Roy’s eyes, “cause I’m about 520 Cenz away from being broke.”

He feels like that is significant somehow but when he can’t identify what it is, Roy shrugs. “Alright,” he agrees, “I’m sure they’ll have a child’s menu to spare for you.”

“THEY WHAT?”

Roy laughs.

—————

Ed slots back into their lives like a tailored glove.

They don’t remember yet – that had been the price. Truth had stolen Ed away from them on the Promised day. In return for his brother’s life and body, he had been erased. Left alone, all personal trace of Edward Elric had been scoured, but for those he retained himself.

Roy seen and then lost the ability to see the bounds of Truth’s cruel logic, but this – was something else.

Ed had been searching for a way to undo it. In the three years he had been gone he had travelled the surrounding countries, for anything he could do to reverse it short of another philosopher’s stone. Which is why he had been trying to get into the military library that day – his old haunt apparently.

Roy’s team had taken one look at the blond following him when they arrived at the office and seemed to release a collective sigh of relief. Riza had smiled and Havoc had immediately crowed “Hey, Chief! Who’s the Boss?”

Ed had smiled and replied, “Hey, Jean. Got a girlfriend yet?”

Havoc had squawked, affronted and promptly called Roy out for selling office secrets to not-so-strange strangers. (Ed got his answer.)

When Al had finally arrived from Xing, his only note from Roy being it was urgent, he had cried at the sight of the strange blond man at Roy’s side. Ed’s own eyes had gone a little watery before he squeezed them tight and hugged his brother harder.

It seemed Al didn’t have to remember to instinctively identify the bond between brothers.

Sure, there were still missteps. Sometimes Ed got that faraway look in his eye, and it was strange the things he sometimes knew about them all when they were still relearning the most basic things about him. But they were moving forwards. And that’s what counted.

Ed and Al often spent their days on a “special top-secret mission from the General” with signed papers for civilians that let them spend hours upon hours at the library, as the two researched for a way to restore memories. Though it was not uncommon for Ed to appear in the office sometimes, with a pile of borrowed books that he left by the couch when Al was out or Winry was in town and particularly scary. The only sound between them was the faint rustle of papers but Roy found that he grew fond of those quiet hours with another person in his office. (Especially one that didn’t threaten to shoot him. Roy averted his gaze from Riza’s narrowed stare. She wasn’t called Hawkeye for nothing.)

After work on Fridays, the team often ends up at Madam Christmas’ bar for drinks where Ed will regale them with past stories and slowly but surely, fill in the gaps in their memories. Madam no longer has to cut him off; Roy finds himself just a bit too entranced as Ed slaps Breda on the back with a hearty laugh and he doesn’t want to miss it through the haze of drink. 

(He doesn’t notice Fuery down the table, as he pulls out his little black book of bets and accepts money from everyone. Falman twitching with an uncharacteristic smile and Jean laughing raucously as Riza places the highest bet with a small smirk.)

One day Roy finally works up the nerve. Ed has his nose shoved deep into the spine of a book where he sits on the little couch, but Roy knows he hears him call Ed’s name by the twitch of his flesh knee. 

“Can I take you out for dinner this evening?” Roy asks.

Ed moves in odd increments; first his eyes move up, then his shoulders straighten, and he brings his right hand of the arm rest where his tanned fingers had been picking at the threads, to close the book and place it painstakingly on the small pile on the floor. He looks up again, leans forwards, elbows on knees, and cocks his head.

“Took you long enough, bastard,” he smiles.

And Roy thinks then, that things in the office aren’t so wrong anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> Any thoughts/ideas/criticisms/kudos would be loved :) hope you enjoyed.


End file.
